The Veteran Voices of Pittsburgh started out quietly enough. First, a few vets gathered for breakfast once a month. Eventually, there was a trip planned to visit a monument in Washington, DC.
Stories that had been bottled up for as much as fifty years began to pour out on that bus trip. Stories of what war was really like.
Everyday should be Veteran’s Story Day. I believe in the healing power of telling true-life stories, especially the ones that are hardest to tell. Not only is it good for the teller, but the world needs first person accounts in order to know what actually happened during calamitous events.
One of the great qualities of the recent PBS Vietnam War series, created for television by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, was the relentless telling of stories by people who lived through it on both sides. The stories were often brutal, but we need to hear them. Third person summaries that supposedly supply facts cannot do justice to the horror and terror – or the exhilaration for some – of war.
A group of less well-known documentarians in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Veteran Voices of Pittsburgh, have been collecting and recording the oral histories of veterans and survivors on podcasts for several years. Kevin Farcas, founder, and Todd DePastino, historian, have reached out to find veterans of all wars and produced a unique archive of stories captured in a warm conversational style.
In 2016, in his 90th year, Gene McShane was recorded describing what it was like to land on Omaha beach in Normandy having been […]

Many people continue to suffer from the results of our recent presidential election. They suffer not only from fear of the unknown (and the known!) that lies ahead, but also from the distress of trying to communicate with relatives, friends and co-workers who voted to go forward into the abyss with Donald Trump. I’ve listened to painful descriptions by mothers and daughters who can no longer speak together. Others have to cut short conversations with friends when they hear things like, “He seemed like the best alternative.”
When I hear those words, I am awash in a speechless sadness for our country. I’m sad because Trump doesn’t represent the best of anything. I’m speechless because I know the conversation about him as president will be fruitless and frustrating – and potentially the end of a friendship, at least for now.
But, I’d like to be able to speak with these people who presently seem to belong to another tribe. Is there a common language that we could converse in more comfortably? Is there a font of wisdom at which we could enjoy a drink together? What would the great philosophers suggest?
Here is what Aristotle had to say about friendship and knowledge:
“A friend is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.”
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
“The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.”
“All people, by nature, desire knowledge.”
These encouraging ideas lead me to think that perhaps a path to greater comfort with friends who think differently […]